Adult learning is more than alternative education, self-help, self-study, or training. Self-directed inquiry can free you from the cultural traps of today’s postmodern world. When you think for yourself, you take control of your life. Intellectual ability and critical thinking soon become substitutes for paper credentials. Simply stated aggressive learning is the most practical guide to a passionately rewarding life.

Saturday, November 7, 2015

Imagine what would happen
if the referees calling penalties in professional football were paid exorbitant
salaries by only the richest teams. One
thing is sure: we would deem it a sham. If the game was obviously rigged, most people
would stop watching. Ironically, that’s precisely what we have today in
American politics. Our elected representatives (our supposed economic referees)
are being openly bribed because not enough of us are watching and so many of our citizens don’t vote.

Both of our major
political parties are unduly influenced by moneyed special interests; one is
just more blatant and ideologically open about it than the other. Unfortunately,
the reason many people don’t pay attention to politics is that they know the
system is corrupt and they feel powerless.

Because of special
interest lobbying, corporations never have to punt. They own our referees. Through
legislative influence they have effectively devastated labor unions while enabling
banks to charge excessive fees for administering customer accounts and to move
away from traditional services to casino-like investments where profits are
capitalized. They take big risks, fully confident that, because of their size,
catastrophic losses will be socialized.

Some of our largest and
most profitable businesses pay poverty-level wages with the assurance that
taxpayers will support their employees with food stamps. The sheer amount of
corporate profits in offshore banks to escape taxation is breathtaking, while
lobbying by the military industrial complex is so effective, our generals and
admirals can’t even cancel the manufacture of weapons they don’t want or need.

Inequality has been escalating at
record rates for decades, a direct result of legislation on behalf of those
with an economic advantage and the power to leverage their influence at every
opportunity. One strategy has been to incite public anger at the poor for not
pulling their weight and appearing to game the system by getting something for
nothing, even when the evidence shows that’s not true. This
feeds people’s inherent tribalistic tendencies because blaming the poor allows
one to identify vicariously with the rich and powerful.

Capitalism is an
incredibly dynamic system capable of both good and ill, but today’s economic
playing field is not in any sense level. Capitalism works best with strictly
regulated competition. In professional football, we don’t hear arguments about a
minimum wage because teams have to compete for players, causing compensation to
soar.

The same principle
applies to the workplace. Capitalism only works effectively for working people
when business has to compete for employees. To assume that human beings should
work full time for poverty wages in the richest country in the world is as absurd
as it would be to play football without protective gear.

The notion that free
markets magically arrive at fair wages for work performed is a fairy tale. Nothing
is free, and our laws for business and labor are biased by design. The
commercial usage of natural resources does not remotely reflect its
environmental costs. Moreover, elected officials’ dependence on private donations
means legislation is never free of partiality. And finally, far too many of the
rules and regulations we live by are created in secret.

Football, of course, is just a
game and may seem to be of little significance, but we are drawn to it
precisely because of our tribalistic instinct for belonging. Sports fans
display near fanaticism in their insistence that referees be fair when calling
penalties. Notice how upset theyget when a penalty
appears unjust. But building an economy where people
can earn a decent living is more important by orders of magnitude than scoring
points in a game. That we insist on fairness in sports contests, and
not in matters where so much more is at stake, reveals a tragic flaw in human
behavior.

The only way we will ever
achieve a level economic playing field in which the interests of average
citizens are matters of real political concern is to publicly fund elections
and forbid the bribing of our elected officials. Until this is accomplished,
the ideologies of the Left and Right will always matter less than the degree of
corruption we’re willing to accept.

The first order of
business is to stop cheerleading with the mindset of the 1950s. The American
aspirations for hard work and self-reliance haven’t changed, but our methodologies
for contracting and compensating wage labor have been radically degraded and diminished
over the last half-century. The rules, regulations, and taxes that created the
middle class have been slowly but steadily altered beyond recognition.

If professional football
had kept pace with our politics these past five decades, the Wall Street team
would take the field with equipment and talent comparable to what the New
England Patriots have today. The opposing team representing working people, however,
would be an assembly of high school B-stringers, who would show up without
helmets or shoulder pads. Every time they got the ball, it would automatically be
fourth down with a fifteen-yard penalty tacked on and no time-outs remaining.

In November 2016, it will
be time for a new lineup of referees to take the field. Let’s make sure they
have an edict for public funding of elections and are individuals who will strive
to overturn Citizens United legislatively. Let’s elect representatives who will
look out for average Americans with an implicit understanding that, if they fail,
they will be held accountable. The penalty will be that they’ll be deemed off
sides, out of bounds, and soon out of office.

Saturday, October 24, 2015

My fascination with
Alaska began in Irving, Texas, in the 1950s, when my fourth-grade teacher read to
her class every day from Jack London’s Call
of the Wild. Some sixty years later, I’m now a resident of Alaska and have
been for more than four decades. Perhaps it’s my fate that, as a result, I
would have the opportunity to drive the legendary Alaska Highway, not once, but
seven times, four of those times by myself. I never tire of the drive and
always look forward to another trip.

Constructed in 1942, the
year before I was born, as a war measure in America’s defense against Japan, the
highway extends 1,390 miles through the Yukon to the heart of Alaska. It
traverses wilderness so breathtaking and spectacular that at times it doesn’t
seem real, almost like something created by the special effects department for
a movie production. My experience has been that if you have a philosopher-self hidden
beneath your consciousness, it will likely surface when you travel this road
alone.

Not surprisingly, the
fiction I write is largely shaped by these influences. More than two decades
ago, while studying Alaska history and philosophy, I began crafting a futuristic
story featuring the Alaska Highway. In 2003, eight years after I began, I
published Portals in a Northern Sky, a
science fictionnovel envisioning a revolutionary
technological breakthrough that allows people not to travel back in time per se,
but rather to look back in time and observe any location on earth during
daytime hours on a cloud-free day at any time in history.

The Gadsden Times, a newspaper in the Deep South, described Portals as “a science fiction novel, a
history lesson, a guided tour of North America’s beauty and a thought-provoking
work of philosophy.” In places like Dawson Creek, Fort Nelson, Summit Lake,
Whitehorse, and other key locations along the highway route, characters in the
novel discuss the rewards of reading literature. Among other classics, Herman
Melville’s Moby-Dick features
prominently in the conversation.

As part of a
philosophical exploration into the notion of fate, one of the protagonists offers
an intriguing comparison of the lives and works of Herman Melville and Jack London.
These two authors were obsessed with the concept of fate, and their novels
reflect their fascination. They were deeply aware that both wilderness and the
sea dramatize and magnify mankind’s fear, frailty, and sense of existential insignificance.

London was born out of
wedlock, Melville with a pedigree. Both men’s mothers had been raised in wealth,
only to marry into hard times, and would ultimately rely on their sons for
support. Both men were drawn to the sea at an early age, and both signed aboard
vessels as deck hands or common sailors. As one character in Portals points out, the sea makes us
radically aware of our profound insignificance as individuals, even as it
amplifies the mystery of the vast knowledge we store beneath consciousness.

Both of the authors were
self-educated, voracious readers who wrote to earn a living, each thinking they
were capable of greater work than the public demanded, especially Melville. He
lived to write, while London wrote to live. Each of them earned money by
lecturing. London was a skilled self-promoter; Melville was not.

At the same time, both
men were moody and prone to depression, frequent disillusionment, and cynicism.
Both had detractors who declared they were insane. Still, both were capable of
writing the kind of prose that penetrates the public psyche in ways that stir
an emotional response as not much else has before or since.

London and Melville had a
way of exaggerating every aspect of our lives to compensate for the important
little things that so often go unnoticed. They were also very much aware of how
often we are influenced and motivated by our shadowy and immensely mysterious
unconscious. Both men were involved in butchery: Melville with whales, London
with seals. Both witnessed human brutality at its worst.

These men produced work
with deep allegoric implications beyond their own understanding of the
connections they were making. Both created magnificent, original,
larger-than-life authoritarian sea captains, Melville’s Ahab and London’s Wolf
Larson, who afford us a vision of all that is right and wrong with humankind.

Melville captured the
human predicament and the psychosomatic essence of the American experience in Moby-Dick, making all of us passengers
on a metaphoric ship named Pequod. Although
it was written in 1851, Moby-Dick has
been described by author Nathaniel Philbrick as a book written for the future
because it contains “the genetic code of America.” He characterizes the novel
as “America’s Bible,” declaring that every time we encounter a new crisis in
this country, Moby-Dick is relevant.

Jack London read the
works of Herman Melville, and his stories transport Melville’s epic primordial struggle
with the unconsciousness symbolism of the sea to the wilderness of the far
north, where the brutality of the natural world takes center stage: the weak perish
and the strong survive.

Politically, Melville was
a capitalist who clung to the economic security of civil service employment.
London was a socialist who despised human inequality and railed against
arbitrary authority until the end of his life. It should be pointed out,
however, that he held racist views common to his time and place. And although he
was a socialist, he lived like an extravagant capitalist.

Melville died in
obscurity at 72, having struggled financially most of his life. His recognition
as a novelist smoldered in fits and starts, but his work didn’t really take off
until after his death. London died famous at age 40, having achieved almost
instant rags-to-riches wealth and celebrity.

As fate would have it, I
once heard Alaska Congressman Don Young say that it was Jack London who brought
him to Alaska, echoing my own reasons for choosing the forty-ninth state as my
home. So, when I heard him being interviewed on a local radio show, I took the opportunity
to phone in. I asked Congressman Young if, as a conservative Republican, he
found it ironic that he was in Alaska because of a socialist. Thinking I had
him in a bind, I wondered how he would talk his way out of it.

Not missing a beat, Young
said, “Jack London? My father knew Jack London.” I was the one who was
speechless.

London’s work confirms John
Muir’s observation that “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest
wilderness.” Indeed, London claimed that he found his perspective for becoming
a successful writer in the wilderness of the Klondike. In the same way, I’ve
observed that ideas and the Alaska Highway go hand-in-hand. The awe-inspiring
scenery, the isolation, and the absence of available radio signals invite deep
contemplation.

The sweeping and at times
overwhelming scenic grandeur puts our human frailties and our brief existence
into a stark light. The natural beauty of the landscape is so formidable as to
give an appearance of permanence in contrast to our fleetingly short lives, and
feelings of insignificance often follow. It’s an existential dilemma that begs
perspective.

Portals
in a Northern Skyis setin 2021. The sequel, A Mile North of
Good and Evil, takes place in 2028, seven years into widespread use of the Portals
technology. In this story, the Alaska Highway serves as the hunting ground for
a serial killer whose behavior represents the personification of evil. The
malevolence of his crimes gives rise to penetrating questions about whether his
nature qualifies as an inevitable part of the natural world. In a concurrent
storyline, an impending doomsday scenario offers a group of individuals, as
well as every reader, a unique perspective on morality and mortality.

This second book took me
twelve years to complete, which means the two works together were on my mind
for a full twenty years. During that time, the only things I can relate to that
haven’t changed dramatically are the Alaska Highway and the beauty of Alaska.

In September 2015, I made
the drive again, all the way from Dallas. Except for the highway having been
paved, the trip was much like my first one more than forty years earlier. Services
and facilities are still few and far between, giving the pervasive sense that
one is detached from civilization. The wilderness remains a clear summons for
philosophical reflection.

In both of my novels,
most of the action takes place in interior Alaska near Mount Denali, a landmark
symbol worthy of its own genre of philosophic contemplation. Seeming to
represent permanence, or even eternity, themajestic mountain elicits thoughts about mortality, morality, and fate,
eternal questions at the heart of the human condition. Considering these ideas
with Alaska wilderness as the backdrop offers a perspective with philosophical echoes
that can last a lifetime.

Saturday, October 10, 2015

The pace of change has
always delineated differences among generations. As often as not, each
generation longs for something they grew up without. For this reason, in my
view, the not too distant future promises a rediscovery of the rewards of
solitude as something that will suddenly seem astoundingly meaningful because
it affords so much time for thought.With
thought comes perspective, and with that comes wisdom worth passing on.

Most of us know people
whose interest in life seems to grow richer and stronger with age, coming ever
closer to achieving a level of awareness that we commonly think of as wisdom.
We also know people whose lives seem to shrink with time, gradually becoming
less and less of who and what they once were.

Life stage researcher
Erik Erickson characterized the years north of middle age as a tipping point,
with one direction moving toward perspective and the other toward despair. Twenty-first
century technology is ratcheting up the process for many people, pushing us
further and faster in whichever direction we are leaning.

My observations suggest
that openness to new experience is a key characteristic for those who strive
for perspective as they grow older. Watching friends and family members
withdraw into a shell of growing angst and despair is one of life’s great
disappointments. When this is someone’s chosen path, efforts to get the person
to change course are rarely successful.

We know the effects of
change in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were astonishing. Generations who
grew up traveling by horse and buggy died witnessing rocket ships and
satellites in space. Now, in this century, we are experiencing even faster change
with communication technologies effectively having nullified geographic
distances, resulting in a retribalized world based more on ideology and political
class than ethnicity.

The solitude of daily
life experienced by earlier generations has been replaced by unrelenting communication
and media distractions. Thoughtful correspondence is increasingly overwritten
by tweets. Time spent looking at snippets of text on small screens is
overtaking time spent reading serious books. In-depth reading is giving way to Cliff
Notes and one-page summaries.

Nevertheless, if we don’t
keep current with technology, the world seems to pass us by. We have less and
less in common with younger generations. Our music, tastes in fashion, and preferences
in entertainment are deemed obsolete and out of touch, and as aging friends and
family pass away, we become ever more isolated.

Each of us can probably relate
to having family members who never signed on with computers. Now they are likely
alienated from social media. I’ve used computers since they came on the market,
but only just recently did I change from using a flip phone to a smartphone. For
a short time, it was a traumatic experience as I felt a complete loss of
control over my ability to use a telephone. (I’m over it now.)

We can easily lose sight
of the fact that Marshall McLuhan was right when he said, “The medium is the
message.” In other words, our tools shape our behavior. Facebook, for example,
has created an environment where we are subtly and not so subtly encouraged to like things. The downside is that doing
so makes us much more aware of what we dislike,
so much so that Facebook is adding a Dislike feature. This existential experience
tends to motivate people to seek out echo chambers where political viewpoints
narrow and contempt escalates and smolders.

Needless to say, for a
species as tribalistic as we human beings are, manipulative media is something
to be constantly aware of, simply to keep ourselves from being unduly
influenced. Social philosopher Eric Hoffer was correct in declaring that hatred
is one of our greatest unifying forces. And thus, the strength of
communications technology is also its weakness: it brings people together while
it alienates and ostracizes others.

Some people take pride in
not watching or even owning a television, not having a cellphone, or not using
computers. On the other hand, some people express pride in not reading books.
But purposeful isolation and alienation of any kind shortchanges perspective. Without
common frames of reference, relating to others becomes more difficult.

Now that I’m accustomed
to my new phone, I view it as something short of magic. It’s the equivalent of
having a personal assistant 24/7. Social media and smartphone apps for seniors
are tremendous aids for keeping in touch with family and assisting with medical
issues. Even so, today’s political environment suggests the world needs much
less chit-chat and much more thoughtfulness and deep reading.

Ralph Waldo Emerson put
our current dilemma in perspective more than a century ago, pointing out that
“every advantage has its tax.” So, if you are feeling alienated by your lack of
technical savvy, Emerson is still good company. His work is all about gaining
and maintaining perspective. Read his essay “Compensation,” and you will be
rewarded with a riveting example of thoughtfulness.

In Emerson’s time,
solitude was a big part of life. If you read the letters and prose of ordinary
citizens during that period and compare them with today’s social media, you may
perceive that we need to rethink and relearn the importance of solitude.

The tax for using the
media available to us is paid in lost opportunity for thoughtful reflection.Wisdom these days will likely be found
by discerning and maintaining the right balance between technological wizardry
and enough silent contemplation to keep from being manipulated politically and to
maintain a level of perspective that makes life worth living.

Friday, September 11, 2015

“Education is a defense
against culture,” said educator and critic Neil Postman. An education that
doesn’t result in a lifelong desire for knowledge is an education that didn’t
take. If one’s efforts cease, the battle is lost to those who use political
anxiety to manipulate vulnerable people.

Consider John, the
accountant, police officer, engineer, attorney, welder, electrician, or any other
occupation that requires learning, skill, and talent. He sailed through school
with ease, taking the hard subjects and shunning electives as a waste of time.
At work, he stands out; most everything he does is judged to be quality work.
John’s political views are fairly black and white. His worldview is heavily
influenced by his occupation and the geographic region where he lives. He has
little patience with people who do not seem to be doing what is expected of
them.

As he ages, John is
increasingly more comfortable in his work and less in his element at home. His
wife has her own career, and over time their interests grow apart, leaving them
fewer and fewer things to talk about. After a hard day’s work, John loses himself
in televised sports and watches just enough biased political reporting to have
developed a slow-burning level of contempt for all the people he believes are
ruining the world.

Simply put, John is more
of a human doing than a human being. All of his life, he has been told how to do things, mostly without asking why. He is like a satellite put into
orbit and set to spinning with such velocity that he can’t stop or spin in a
way that goes counter to his cultural indoctrination. Does this sound like anyone
you know, male or female?

Most of us grow up
constructing a worldview so heavily influenced by our geography and our social
affiliation that we believe our personal outlook constitutes straight-up reality.
Some of us are virtual prisoners of an internalized regional ideology, which
means broadly that we’re certain who the out groups are—namely, the people we
imagine are keeping us from living better lives.

The target may be immigrants,
welfare recipients, or the ethnic outgroup of the moment. The list is long, and
the irony is that many citizens allow those in power to rig the system to their
own advantage, often through the process of vicarious identification. They delude
themselves into believing that they have more in common with the very rich than
with those who are struggling to survive.

For decades I have been arguing that what citizens
need in today’s politically partisan and fast-changing world is an existential
education. By this I mean a deep level of knowledge that’s based on immersion in
the humanities and behavioral sciences. Such an education enables a person to fully
appreciate the range of differences within our species and to recognize that, as
mortal beings, we are subconsciously aware and upset that we are going to die.
It teaches us to deal with these harsh aspects of the human condition without the
need to find scapegoats to distract us from this mostly unconscious but smoldering
anxiety.

In other words, an
existential education enables a person to create one’s own meaning in life with
some genuine independence from the conformist demands of one’s culture. It also
fosters sufficient reasoning ability to dissipate the inevitable angst that
comes with being mortal.

A fundamental goal of an
existential education is the ability to burst rigid conformist worldview bubbles
and to prevent new ones from forming. The idea is to increase one’s capacity to
discern a more objective sense of reality, while remaining fully cognizant that
we are locked in an inescapable mode of subjectivity, the only solution being
nonexistence.

An existential education
should enable a person to deconstruct the collective lies and cultural myths we
grow up accepting as absolute truth and to see through the pretense of
manipulative advertising and political ploys designed to have us act against
our own interests. It teaches us to always be alert to the reality that, more
often than not, things are not as they appear and to be autonomously impervious
to the perception that human beings have value only in economic terms.

Curiosity lies at the heart
of a successful existential education by cultivating a continuous thirst for knowledge
and for a better appreciation of our subjective existence. Understanding that
we will never nail reality to the wall, we know that if we quit trying, our
perspective suffers and our anxiety festers.

Without the benefit of an
existential education, we, like John, are apt to see the world exclusively in
terms of our respective means of earning a living, and our local economic
concerns will likely trump the interests of anyone we consider outsiders. If
lumber is the primary industry, then those whose income depends on it don’t
want to hear about the need to save trees. If it’s oil, they don’t want to hear
about global warming.

If people are unfamiliar
with the divergent customs of others the world over, they are less likely to
empathize with those whose interests conflict with their own. They’ll be eager
to believe everything negative that they hear about those they consider to be
the opposition.

History makes it crystal
clear that studying the humanities won’t humanize those whose attitudes and
predispositions don’t allow it, but the inquiry most certainly helps those who
strive to be better human beings. I know this to be true, not from theory, but
from personal experience. Some people can alleviate existential angst through
religious faith, but for others, such conviction has the opposite effect and
leads to tribalism at its worst.

One thing we know for
certain is that no ethnic group, no country, no nationality, no religious
affiliation has a lock on morality and virtue. Even so, most everyone assumes their
own culture is superior to all others.

Growing up with a narrow
worldview and without the ability to expand one’s understanding is to be a
prisoner of time and place. It sets one up to be easily manipulated by those
with a political agenda, as evidenced by the current state of politics in a
country where inequality is growing fast by lobbied design.

Clinging to a constricted
or parochial worldview is a recipe for engendering the kind of contempt that
offers relief only when it’s redirected as scorn toward others. Uncertainty fosters
bigotry among ignorant people. Through collective contempt, people let their kind off the hook from bearing any
accountability for their illiteracy. To place blame is to effortlessly escape
responsibility.

When worldviews clash, an
existential education offers alternative points of view for reflection, comparisons,
other possibilities, and the knowledge that even cultures with very different
customs share fundamental values and have similar needs. A deep resource of
accumulated knowledge can diffuse pent-up anxiety by supplying something else to
consider besides the usual arbitrary accusations that come with our tribalistic
predispositions.

In a nutshell, an
existential education can help human doings become better human beings. Our
penchant for tribalism appears to be innate, and existential contempt remains
the Achilles heel of our species. This needn’t be so if we seek the knowledge and
the will to dissipate our own cultural angst.

Saturday, August 22, 2015

A strong middle class is like
a vegetable garden, requiring a rich economic environment in the same manner
that a garden needs fertile soil. We do not say to seeds, “It’s all up to you. Don’t
worry about the PH factor or the nitrogen or the potassium in the soil. Just do
your thing, seeds.” But this is precisely the economic policy that many people advocate.

Vegetable gardens require
constant care. If their soil is depleted, testing may be necessary to ensure
the right ratio of nutrients. An economy for human beings is infinitely more
complicated than a garden, but vital ingredients like education, living wages,
and hard and soft infrastructure, which are essential for growing and sustaining
a society, are often the first areas that trickle-down proponents suggest for
cost cutting. Rather than testing the soil, they accuse the seeds of lacking
the motivation to grow.

Now let’s move metaphorically
from the garden into the garage where the car is parked. If the car battery is
dead, we don’t drain more voltage, we jump-start it with a powerful charge. If the
car idles briefly but runs out of gas, we have to get fuel from another vehicle
before we can drive. To do this, we prime a syphon hose with a rush of liquid
to get the fuel moving from one tank to the other. Merely getting rid of the
fumes does nothing to solve the underlying problem. Far too often in our
political disputes we lose sight of the fundamental purpose of our efforts to
thrive.

By all existential measures
of human decency, an economy is not more important than its reason for
existence. Its engines need adequate fuel, and our metaphorical garden has to
be sustainable. This means that its long-term viability is more important than
any single harvest or any individual or group.

Thus, the constant
political cry to elect business executives to run the country often misses the
point. The economy is far, far more important than business, although running
the government in a businesslike manner is desirable. To reify capitalism, as
if it is more essential than its reason for being or the people it is supposed
to serve, is a recipe for dysfunction at best and oppression at worst. Sadly,
this misguided ethos lies at the core of our inability to achieve political
equilibrium.

The whole methodology of
reengineering, rightsizing, downsizing, and creating a workforce of temporary
employees was a legal strategy to avoid paying employee benefits. In our garden
analogy this might appear to be efficient, except the result over time has been
extreme soil depletion. Not enough of the profits excised at harvest are
getting back into the ground.

Our garden is not working
for all of us, and the abundance at harvest time is unjustly distributed. Political
power trumps the labor of those whose efforts made the bounty possible. Claims
that unskilled labor is not worthy of a living wage reflect the smoldering arrogance
and contempt of tribalism: Our garden, not theirs. We are deserving; they
aren’t. We have the power to legislate; they don’t.

The U.S. Tax Code is a
finely tuned political instrument shaped with unrelenting influence by moneyed
interests. Slowly but surely, over a period of decades, the tax burden has
shifted to those less able to pay. Fortunes are made via insider trading.
Supercomputers skim the cream off the stock market.

Financial institutions
bleed 401K retirement plans with nickel-and-dime fees that amount to huge sums
of money by the time the funds are actually used for retirement. The banking
industry applies new rules to customer accounts with whack-a-mole frequency by
dreaming up new service charges and hidden fees. Banks can legally charge
eighty dollars for a five-dollar overdraft.

Government subsidies for
big business increase every year. Big Pharma’s lobbying efforts have succeeded
in making it illegal in some cases for the government to negotiate drug prices.
Student loans are guaranteed profit centers that can’t be discharged through
bankruptcy, but corporations routinely use Chapter 11 as a trustworthy way of
shedding debt.

The promise inherent in
the American spirit of self-reliance and faith in hard work obscures the
reality of a system meticulously rigged with carrot-and-stick hype in which the
waving of the stick hides the fact that the carrot is more apparent than real.

Consider the European
experiment with austerity or the state of Kansas, where the governor’s tax
cutting has nearly bankrupted the state. Nothing like the ideology of low, low
taxes and small, small government exists anywhere in the world with a sustained
middle class because it’s analogous to planting a garden in sand.

Our history offers an
indisputable record of how the financial sector has effectively severed the
reward connection between productivity and compensation for work performed. Our
technological future promises a steady increase in the numbers of white-collar
and professional jobs being replaced by software and robotics.

Simply put, if an individual’s
duties can be reduced to an algorithm, they can be replaced with an app. Moreover,
there is nothing on the horizon, save the power of organized labor and an
informed and activist public, to keep the middle class from perpetual, if not exponential,
decline.

Following admirable
instincts emphasizing individual responsibility, lots of people believe in
trickle-down economics. They are not entirely wrong. Individual responsibility
is very important. But over-focusing on the virtue of individuals is inadequate
for our garden economy. Most of us have little difficulty in determining that
our own families are more important than the business of business, and yet
there are many who have great difficulty in applying the same standard to others.
This bias serves as a tool for political manipulation.

The historical economic
record and current state of the economy are proof that trickle down leads to a
disproportionate rate of trickle up. In today’s world, small government is a
euphemism for big corporations with the power to do as they please.

The garden analogy for
our fiscal policy is a reminder of how our social and ecological interconnectedness
is critical for our long-term sustainability. Our growing rate of inequality
demonstrates that we need to plow deep and rethink our garden economy.

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

The universe is visibly menacing.
Our lives were made possible only because of freakish cosmic catastrophes. Our
lives are short and fraught with danger, which makes reality scary. This is why
we require a significant measure of illusion in order to cope with the ruthless
nature of existence.

We seldom acknowledge that
escape is a crucial reason for culture, but it’s easy to demonstrate. Many
small children, for example, buffer reality by adopting security blankets
because life is frightening to them. In the same way, culture helps to shelter
us from the stark aspects of reality because we abhor chaos. Park this idea for
the moment.

Now try this: Find a
comfortable place to relax, and think about how, at this very moment, the earth
is spinning on its axis at the rate of 1,040 miles per hour, while
simultaneously speeding around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour. The sun is
traveling at 483,000 miles per hour around the galaxy, and the galaxy itself is
moving at 1.3 million miles per hour.

So, if you drive two
miles to the grocery store, determining how far you have actually traveled in
the cosmos is complicated. When you consider the facts of our travels in space,
it’s not unusual to feel the need to grab hold of something. In addition, wondering
where all of this wayfaring is taking us could drive you insane, if figuring it
out were to become too important to your sense of curiosity.

We are blazing through the
heavens at warp speed, going nowhere fast, in a universe demonstrably hostile
to life, favoring chaos and chance over order. The membrane of observable
conditions for organic life in the cosmos is paper thin and rarer than a precious
jewel. Our lives represent flickering sparks in eternal darkness, and yet, so
much of the precious time we are alive, our cultures are at war over arbitrary folk
narratives that are, as often as not, patently absurd.

Now let’s un-park the
notion of culture as a shelter from reality. In 1974, cultural anthropologist Ernest
Becker published The Denial of Death,
for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. Multiple readings of his book offer a never-ending
supply of insights into how our lives are profoundly affected by the fact that
we are mortal.

Becker observed that
embedded beneath our consciousness is a smoldering neurosis, a deep-seated fear
of death, and that much of our conscious and unconscious lives are spent in
avoidance of, or in reaction to, this condition. Such behavior suggests that unfiltered
reality is a burden too harsh to bear without meaningful diversion. We drive
ourselves intentionally blind, Becker said, “With social games, psychological
tricks and personal preoccupations so far removed from reality that they are
forms of madness.”

Further, we tranquilize
ourselves with trivia, become creative as a social license for an escape
through the formation of respectable obsessions, and search desperately for existential
preferences. This explains, in part, why the metaphorical cousins of death,
change, uncertainty, and otherness upset us so easily. Mortality, Becker
maintained, is humanity’s Achilles Heel because our uneasiness renders us tragically
susceptible to folly and manipulation.

Simply put, the human
condition is all about management of our mortality because chronic anxiety is
inevitable for creatures smart enough to know that death is a relentless
stalker, a situation that gets to the heart of the notion of authenticity. To
quote Becker, “It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live
dooms us to a life that is never really ours.”

This brings me to The Worm at the Core by Sheldon Solomon,
Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski. These psychologists have continued Becker’s
work, having spent decades researching how our lives are influenced by our
mortality and how our not being aware of this reality causes anxiety.

Known as terror management theory, their work shows
definitively how we depend on self-esteem, group identity, and the shelter of
consensus to keep thoughts of our inevitable impermanence at bay. It
illustrates how worldviews are fragile, psychosomatic constructions that render
us feeling unprotected simply by the very existence of opposing views.

Through membership, our
respective cultures offer us a pathway to symbolic immortality by nature of
their long-term existence. When our worldviews are threatened, we feel vulnerable,
and thus we come together as a self-protective force against existential
threats. We are emotionally rewarded by illusions of security, even when our
actions lead to conflict.

The authors of The Worm at the Core write, “When
confronted with reminders of death, we react by criticizing and punishing those
who oppose or violate our beliefs, and praising and rewarding those who support
or uphold our beliefs.”

The more you study terror
management theory, the more apparent it becomes just how seriously flawed our
species is when it comes to dealing with uncensored reality and otherness,
especially otherness. It’s almost as
if we have been neurologically wired to pay an awful emotional price for being intelligent,
for always being aware on some level that we are going to die.

How unfortunate it is for
our species that hatred proves to be an acceptable distraction—a readily
available substitute for the kind of reality that genuine thoughtfulness could
provide. What else could we assume of a creature that derives comfort and
solace from a purposeful pursuit of ignorance, since the truth about vitally
important matters means much less than the emotional shelter of collective
illusion?

When people perceive that
their worldview represents truth incarnate, then evidence that they are wrong
about anything deemed important carries a mortal threat because it suggests
that they could be wrong about everything. What if their most cherished
political views or the fundamental claims of their religion are untrue? After
all, there are literally thousands of divergent belief systems. They can’t all
be true, and because they can’t, the emotional stakes among true believers are
apt to skyrocket during periods of rapid change, insecurity, and unrest.

This is why social issues
like same-sex marriage are considered earthshaking events, and it’s why so many
people act as if the legalization of gay marriage is a metaphor for the end of
the world. Indeed, anything contrary to their deep sense of reality feels like a
mortal blow to their sense of existential security.

The right of same-sex
couples to marry is a human rights issue and a recognition that homosexuality
has always been a part of the human condition. In time, most people we will come
to realize that homophobia amounts to a moral outrage, that for centuries
millions of our fellow citizens have been forced to live in the shadows, afraid
to be who they are, unable to honestly express their feelings or make their
true affinities known.

It’s time for our cultureto awaken from itsfear-based prejudice, which up to the present has denied that homosexuals
exist or, in some cases, have a right to exist. Belonging to a culture that
disapproves of human biology is like a people vowing to disbelieve the wind
because they don’t like the way it feels on their face. A preferred reality is
no longer an option. Same-sex attraction is not unique to our species. What’s
new is that the curtains on this human biological trait are finally thrown open
and continued bigotry and denial are not going to close them.

I’ve been studying the
psychology of mortality for decades, and I’m convinced that mankind will never
achieve adulthood until it is commonly understood how fragile our human psyche
is with regard to our mortality and how we are predisposed to act aggressively
toward out-groups when our beliefs
are challenged. The political implications for fully understanding this psychological
behavior is existentially explosive and could lead to incredible improvements
in human relations.

Ernest Becker nailed it
when he observed that leaving the knowledge of human behavior to experts leads
to “a general imbecility.” This doesn’t mean that we should ignore the science
of human behavior. It means that we need to study it as if the business of
being a human being matters to us as individuals as much as it does to
scientists.

A preferred reality may
indeed offer us psychological shelter—and we might be wise to admit that we
require some buffering—but if we remain forever unaware of how our need for agreed-upon
illusions affects our relationships with others, we can never truly experience
freedom and we will never achieve what we like to think of as civilization.

Saturday, June 20, 2015

When flipping through the
cable TV channels, it’s not unusual to find a pride of African lions getting
ready to feast on Cape buffalo. Sometimes we’ll see several lions take down a
buffalo while the rest of the buffalo in the nearby herd appear to stand around
like idiots. At other times, a second buffalo will come to the rescue of the
downed and chewed up animal, followed by more and more members of the herd,
until finally the lions are sent running for their very lives. Watching this behavior,
we want to say, “What took you so long?” Let this scenario percolate.

Elsewhere on cable, the
History Channel features a fascinating account of Caligula, an emperor of ancient
Rome, who ruled for four years, committing some of the cruelest, deadliest, and
most humiliating acts against members of the Roman senate one can imagine. On
and on he goes, increasing the severity of each punishing deed, with contempt and
utter disdain for the very existence of members of the ruling class in name
only. Caligula put people to death arbitrarily and ravished the wives of senate
members in their presence, even at one point declaring himself a God and
demanding that he be worshiped.

In similar circumstances,
murderous dictators like Hitler, Stalin, Muammar Gaddafi, Idi Amin, Pol Pot,
and Saddam Hussein, all stayed in power surrounded by people afraid to
challenge them, even when it was clear that it would doubtless cost some of them
their lives.

Throughout history we can
find horrid examples of groups of people being guarded by only a few individuals
with weapons as they approach a place where others ahead in the same group are
being executed in plain sight. Those remaining meekly allow themselves to be
killed without resisting or fighting back, even though, with their numbers, they
could easily overpower their guards.

Now, once you compare
these examples and think it through, what jumps out at you is the reality that,
compared to human beings, buffalo are more decisive and quick to act. There
were attempts on Hitler’s life, and Caligula was eventually assassinated, but
you have to wonder why, in the name of human courage and decency, it took so
long.

I use these examples to examine
the way we Americans relate to power, resist oppression, and react to threats.
In The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and
Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power, Steve Fraser
shows how, over time, we slowly but surely have ceded our willingness to assert
ourselves and resist oppression.

The ethos of American
identity as being fiercely independent and self-reliant came into full bloom in
the nineteenth century with the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Herman Melville, and Henry David Thoreau. It was a time when the lifestyle
expectations of individuals were markedly different from those of today. A
person from that era would have difficulty communicating with someone now without
both being shocked by the divergence of their worldviews.

The psychological and
perceptual distance between then and now can best be understood through Abraham
Lincoln’s opinion that people destined to work for wages without being able to
extract themselves from such restricting circumstances would live in bondage—a
new form of bondage that was similar to slavery but not as severe. Lincoln
deemed labor a sacred virtue, and his idea of freedom included both the right to
strike and the hope that individuals working for wages would eventually be able
to free themselves from such subjugation.

Studying the troubled history
of labor puts today’s economy in a new light. In the mid-nineteenth century,
the vast majority of people lived and worked on farms and in small shops. Even
in the worst of economic times, they were still able to scratch out a living.
Only a very small percentage of the population worked in manufacturing.

Lincoln believed that it
is only through labor that we get most of what we really need and that the very
essence of freedom is derived from working for oneself. Leaving the farm and
working for wages was suspect, fraught with danger, and considered psychologically
traumatic. Lincoln thought labor should always trump capital in value, precisely
the reverse of present-day economics. Industrialization had a devastating
effect on the actual freedom of individuals.

Earning wages enabled
people to buy things in a way they never had before, but in recent times, as
thirty-year home mortgages and myriad credit options became a part of everyday
life, the loss of independence for individuals has become psychologically
threatening. These days, being indentured to debt is accepted as normal, but
with it comes a dramatic loss of independence. House payments and credit card
debt make it very difficult to defy one’s boss, and the deeper in debt one
goes, the more submissive one has to be. Goodbye herd, goodbye resistance, goodbye
unions.

If working conditions are
dangerous and one is deeply in debt, it is increasingly likely that risks will simply
be accepted as part of the job. Drive by a subdivision of nice homes and
well-manicured yards, and it’s philosophically worth noting that the occupants of
these structures be disciplined but also obedient, often amounting to a blind deference
to authority. The most important lessons from history suggest that equitable
economics require constant negotiation, and if an imbalance of power moves too
far in any direction, freedom for some will be diminished.

Today we witness a continuous
public outcry about government overregulation in the workplace, and indeed some
of the criticism is valid. But knowledge of the history of labor is critical
for perspective. In the ninetieth and early twentieth centuries, thousands of
workers died every year when industrialization began to overtake agriculture.
As Fraser points out, between 1890 and 1917, 158,000 railroad employees were
killed on the job. In one year, 20,000 were injured and 2,000 killed. In the
transition to industry, millions of children began working for wages, including
toddlers in some cases.

In the nineteenth century,
convict labor for private profit was a growth enterprise. Working conditions
were in many cases comparable historically to a Soviet prison gulag. Unions
were created to give working people a voice. During the transition from an agrarian
lifestyle to industrialization, there were numerous public uprisings and
protests that turned violent. By comparison, these examples would make the recent
Occupy Wall Street movement look like a children’s birthday party.

Group solidarity today,
unfortunately, is fractured by diversity. The workforce is too distracted, too scattered,
and membership is splintered into so many small factions that a consensus to
mount an effective protest is often too hard to come by. Too many echo chambers
drown out cries for help.

More importantly, today’s
workers are unaware of any other ways to live. Working for wages or starting
your own business and being indentured to debt is all they have ever known. The
nineteenth-century lifestyle of a very real sense of independence is long
forgotten.

We don’t have to go out
on a limb to guess what Lincoln, Emerson, Thoreau, and Melville would have said
about America’s most successful companies legally paying wages so low that their
employees are eligible for food stamps. They would be appalled, just as we
should be. They would likely have deemed it a form of feudalistic slavery. Moreover,
they would have scoffed at the notion that this is an issue about marketfreedom. It’s legally contrived exploitation
plain and simple.

Today’s labor concerns make
a mockery of Emerson’s notion of self-reliance. When minimum wage jobs are all
that’s available, and demand for goods and services are severely depressed,
self-reliance defaults to a matter of survival in circumstances that make the
notion of self-sufficiency subject to cynicism and sarcasm.

During America’s labor uprisings,
the majority of citizens shared the same lifestyles, expectations, and
aspirations about work and leisure. Today, we have echelons of economic classes
with nothing, whatsoever, in common.

Making an effort to understand
history is a good way to put our collective behavior in the kind of context
that will garner more cooperation and make us more vigilant and assertive. It’s
time to come together and stand up to those whose economic advantage has been
legislated into existence as a privileged entitlement. It’s time for the herd
to come together and act decisively.